openCards Strategy Advice

This "Stategy Advice" we will take a closer look on the area “Build” of the Star Trek Second Edition game system as an example. The main question of the area “build” ist “how to build my deck”. This question focuses on favorite affiliations, cards, strategies (for example capture) and - in case of tournament players - the current metagame. Therefore the following topics can be found there:

• Affiliations and Factions (special articles about strength or weakness of affiliations)
• Card reviews (the classic review of special cards)
• Strategy Article (articles about strategies, themes or dilemma combinations, that focuses not only on one card - articles about the current metagame of ST2E)
• Decks (deck listings sorted for affiliations and strategies - ready to download for the 2E Deckbuilder)

openCards and its Writer Team contributes content in form of articles to the topics “Affiliations and Factions”. What is really new is that we invite you to design the look of your favorite game on openCards in a very easy way. For this purpose there will be three different ways to contribute your own ideas, strategies and Hints & Tricks: the card review, the strategy article and the deck listing…which we will a closer look on today.

Card - Review
Maybe the best known kind of article about trading card games. On openCards you can choose a card you want to write a review of from card lists (or search results from our detailed search forms). After you have chosen your card, you will be offered a form to write your article, where the game text, collection info and picture of the card will be displayed automatically so you can focus on writing the article (you will be supported by an text editor to change text formats). You can preview your article before it goes online to see what it will look like.

Your openCards User Name and date of creation will be added automatically.

Everything is looking ok? Then hit the “Submit” button and the article will be published on openCards and will appear on the list of recently posted articles in the area “build” Strategy, in the news for the game system, on your profile as content written by you and as a link on the site of the card the article is about (area: Inside-Cards). All openCards Members can now leave comments or discuss this article with you.

Strategiy Article
Different than the card review the strategy article does not focus on a single card but a special strategy using multiple cards, card combinations or whole decks, that can be presented and discussed there. As an reference for a search you can give your article tags of:

• one ore more affiliations concerning this strategy (for example: romulans for a Gal Gath’thong Deck)
• one ore more game strategies (where you can choose from a list: Assimilation, Battle, Capture, etc.)
• a dilemma strategy (where you choose from a prepared list too: Kill, Capture, etc.)

Based on this information tags these articles can be searched for in the openCards data bank.
There will be also a template for the strategy article with integrated editor to format your text. Furthermore you can add pictures (for example of important cards). Just as well as in the card review your user name and date of creation will be added automatically as well as you can preview the article before you click the submit button, and post it on openCards.

It will be published on the list for recent released strategy articles in the area “ST2E-Build-Strategy”, in the news for the game system as well as in your profile as conted created by you. All openCards Members are now able to comment on this article or discuss it with you.

Decklistings
Of course openCards provides you with a template to publish your deck listings. It will support you with search forms to add your cards, alternatively you can add your deck directly from your 2E Deckbuilder (all cards will be automatically connected to the corresponding page in the area “Inside - Cards”).

Just as in the strategy article you can add information tags to the deck listing concerning the strategy (the affiliations will be added automatically as tags for the search routine).

With your clearance the deck will be posted on openCards and added to the openCards Deck data bank. It will be posted in the list for recent published Decks in the area “ST2E-Build-Decks”, in the news for the game system as well as in your profile for created content by you. Furthermore in the area “Inside-Cards” will very card that you include in your deck be back licked to your deck.

All those features focus on you, they make sure, that you can create content on openCards very easily. Beyond that they take care that through automatically created links your content gets the attention it deserves.